When you start using 1Password, creating a strong Master Password is the first and most important thing you’ll do. We all know that the Master Password is the sentry that protects your data, so choosing a super-secure password is the key to starting your journey towards better security. After all, this will be the ‘one password’ that you have to remember from now on, so you want to make it a good one! Our Chief Defender Against the Dark Arts has written an awesome blog post to help you through this important step, but there’s a lot of information in there and it can be a little bit overwhelming.

One of our goals with 1Password is to make security convenient. We’ve thought long and hard about how to make the process of choosing this important password simpler and more friendly for our new users.

Could we make the password creation process fun, and maybe even danceable? Why not?

We called on our friend, Jonathan Mann, to help us teach everyone how to create a strong Master Password. It turns out, his method involves a lot less reading.

We’ve been humming this song for weeks now, and I’m so glad we can finally share it with you! I’m pretty sure my favourite scene is the 35 bats, but I’d love to know which one makes you smile the most.

That’s a novel approach to thinking up a good master password. But what do you think of the practicalities of choosing such a long password given that it has to be entered each time you restart an iOS device? And even that assumes you have TouchID, otherwise it’s usually a requirement to enter the password every time the app is opened.

I’m not saying the approach is wrong; I just wonder whether people will cook up a really (really!) strong password and then find that actually using it day to day – particularly on iOS – doesn’t suit them.

I personally have a very long Master Password and I don’t find it too difficult to enter on my Touch ID devices once in a while, although I hear you about entering it on non-Touch ID devices. Still, for the sake of your own security, we do still recommend sticking with these strong Master Passwords, even if it is a bit more work on certain devices.

I have read all the older posts about Master Passwords, and have been recently reading up a lot on what the best scheme is for this time. After seeing this post I’m a little confused though. My current master passphrase is something that I came up with, seems pretty odd and something normal person wouldn’t say in conversation. But, after reading about how humans are terrible at being/picking random, I’m doubting its actual strength.

This post mentions that it wants to help new users with better passphrase. Is it just meant for those who would currently be using a terrible “password123” type password?

Is a diceware master passphrase still recommended like it was back when the ‘Toward Better Master Passwords’ post came out? If so, what is the recommended word amount since it was suggested to add one more word last year? 6?

I believe that the advice in “Toward Better Master Passwords” stands. But note that it was maximalist advice. If you feel that you have a good Master Password and you aren’t trying to defend against, say, the NSA trying to guess your Master Password, you probably don’t need to change it.